Well, the Dell Inspiron E1705 I bought showed up yesterday.  Only showed up two weeks before they said it was.  No compaints on this end.  Pretty nice laptop, all in all.

I’ve already started to install Gentoo Linux on the E1705.  Been taking notes what I do along the way.  With all new hardware, this is going to take a little bit to get everything working.  At this time, I have a somewhat stable system running.  I’m still trying new things constantly, so I haven’t gotten to the point to write a good guide to follow as of yet. 

For example, I have just gotten the Intel 3945ABG wireless network card to work, but to do so I’m using the mm-sources kernel tree (linux-2.6.16-rc6-mm2).  I have gotten xorg to work using the vesa drivers, but I am having issues with the ati-drivers (not sure if they will even work at this point).  I think I might stick with this kernel though since it did end up having a lot of nice things added, card reader support and a scheduler for multi-core systems.  I think by the end of this week I’ll have a nice guide up though.  I’ll put the lspci output up now though.

There is also one more issue I might need to solve first.  When trying to install my Windows XP Professional that I had got from school, I always get a blue screen of death during the installation.  Something about the pci.sys is causing trouble.  Still looking into that issue, but it was using a Windows XP Pro installation disk that did not have any service packs.